If you would like to purchase this daily painting, please send your bid by email. Startprice 150 Euro. End of sale April 1st, 2015 at 6.00 pm (local time Berlin Germany). Terms of Sale and Right of Withdrawal.

In other news, Hawkgirl is coming to that ATOM spinoff! Also with the other dude from new Who as Rip Hunter! Now I'm kind of even more annoyed that Ray isn't Ted because then this would be Booster. *hands* I am just saying. (Though on the other hand, I'm glad I don't find Ted stalkery and annoying. So there's that.) This show is apparently also going to feature Caity Lotz (as Canary??? I guess time travel makes all things possible...) plus Victor Garber's half of Firestorm and the Captain Cold/Heatwave duo from Flash (though I hope they still appear on the Flash because the Barry/Cold stuff is great). I'm guessing it's an anthology series? I don't even know. But if they can pull off Grodd, I have hope they can make Shayera work, because JLU Shayera is awesome and I'd hope they'd take some cues from here. (Would that also open the door to John Stewart? Please say yes.) eta: Apparently it's not Shayera but someone named Kendra Saunders. Sigh. Thanks to thistlerose for the info. /eta

And somehow I don't have a Shayera icon. That is a shame.

I'm not sure how the Supergirl show is going to work, and I haven't heard anything about Titans in a while (and I would really, really like Titans to a. happen and b. be good), but this sounds like it could be fun.

Meanwhile, we're not far away from the release of DareDevil, which looks like it could be good, and then the Jessica Jones show (which also looks like it could be good, from the set pics I've seen on tumblr) and man, did you ever think you'd see a tv schedule with all these live action comics shows on it?

A number of art museums have been revitalizing their websites as they begin to realize what a powerful tool they are for public relations, as well as for their theoretical mission of education.

While not all can aspire to the gold standard set a few years ago by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, many are doing a creditable job of not only showcasing the museum but making large portions of their collections available online in searchable form.

While many museums are still clueless, going to the trouble to catalog their collections in online databases, and then providing less than useful images at small sizes (likely out or misguided of misinformed notions about copyright), some are doing it right.

The initial page for the collections comes up with a simple search box. My one small complaint is that the page I find most useful to search from doesn’t come up until you’ve done a search, so I like to initially hit the search button with an empty query to get to this page.

From there, you can sort into collections on the left, as well as maker, material, object type and technique. I found the collections of American Painting, European Painting and Prints & Drawings especially fruitful. The museum’s collection is strong in American art in particular.

In Prints & Drawings, you may want to limit by material (e.g. watercolor). In all searches, you may find it helpful to use the “Has Image” filter at the top of the page.

The images are presented in zoomable versions, which can be viewed fullscreen, making the zoom feature actually useful. Those in the public domain have download arrows. You need to click on one of those silly “use” disclaimers, but I’ve gotten more tolerant of those under the heading of (“if it makes them feel better about putting large versions of public domain images online, fine”).

Many of the images are available in high resolution, allowing you actually appreciate them in a way that the tiny web images offered up by some museums don’t allow. (Most of the detail crops I’ve provided for the example images above are not even at full resolution.)

The Indianapolis Museum of Art has impressed me enough with their online presence that I have added Indianapolis to my list of places I’d like to visit, just to see this collection in person.

It's Tuesday, time for Episode 9 of the serialized audio dramatization of Dinotopia: The World Beneath. You can listen to the track by clicking on the play button below, or by following the direct link to SoundCloud.

Arthur, Oriana, Bix, and Crabb explore further into the caverns, and in the process, each of them discovers more about their own inner lives.

As many of you know or suspect, I prefer watercolor, pencil and digital to working in other mediums. There is a energy and vitality to working with lines that I can't seem to get in other ways.

Also, watercolor and pencil has become comfortable routine action for me; like making cheese toast, or asking someone else to make me cheese toast.

Oil Painting on the other hand is something more stressful, like amateur bomb defusal. (red wire or blue wire? I DON"T KNOW I'M CUTTING ALL THE WIRES)

Still, sometimes I get an image in my head that just won't work with watercolor and pencil. It needs more 'oomph'. And there is nothing like working in oil for achieving oomph.

And lacking a mast to tie myself to, I cannot ignore the siren song of Rembrandt. So I dig out the Old Holland paints and walnut oil to try my hand at it again.

So for this week's post I am sharing a work in progress of oil I have been working on. I hope you enjoy.

Acrylic underpainting on gessoed 11x14 panel

Monochrome oil over the acrylic on panel

The final painting will be available to see in person at the KrabJab show, "Marriage is a Work of Art" debuting April 11. It will be there alongside Annie's gorgeous painting that she will be revealing later this week.

In Closing: Please remember to observe April Fool's day by asking all your friends what they got their mothers for Mother's Day.

Fandom: Cabin PressureCharacters/Pairing/Other Subject: DouglasContent Notes/Warnings: noneMedium: digital artArtist on DW/LJ: n/aArtist Website/Gallery: on DAWhy this piece is awesome: Douglas! He's such a great character, and so perfectly captured in this cartoon. I just wanted to fit this last little artwork into my Cabin Pressure month.Link: Douglas

Fandom: Cabin PressureCharacters/Pairing/Other Subject: Douglas and MartinContent Notes/Warnings: noneMedium: digital paintingArtist on DW/LJ: tealinArtist Website/Gallery: tealin on DWtealin as twirlynoodle on LJWhy this piece is awesome: I can't resist another work by tealin. In this, Douglas and Martin are flying endlessly into the sunset, and they're bored, bored, bored. What I most love here is the way the light of the sunset is captured and reflects off them both, and from the cockpit glass. Lovely. The title refers to the esisode this illustrates. Link: Cabin Pressure Advent: Limerick

(Technically this takes place during the first Captain America movie, so it contains no spoilers for the show, but I think of it more as an Agent Carter fic since it draws on characterization from the TV show.)

"Howard," Peggy said, "please do not poison anyone. Least of all yourself. If nothing else, think of the loss to the war effort."

Unlike a lot of other comic book characters, Daredevil’s past is relatively uncluttered in terms of continuity. The inconsistencies between different takes on the character that do exist, mostly have to do with Matt Murdock’s early life; specifically the circumstances of his fateful accident, and the timing of the death of his father Jack Murdock. The origin has also been added to in various ways through mini-series such as Daredevil: Father and Daredevil: Battlin’ Jack Murdock.

And, my thoughts on the substance that blinded him? I will get to that too!

Matt’s age at the time of his accident

In the most recent live footage we’ve seen, a thirty second TV spot (see below), Matt says that he was blinded at the age of nine when Stick asks him about it. There’s no way of knowing, just from this clip, how much time is supposed to have elapsed between the accident and his first meeting with Stick, though it seems unlikely to me that he would give his age as “nine” if he were still nine at the time.

Either way, it appears that Matt’s accident is happening earlier the farther away we get from his first appearance back in 1964. In Daredevil #3 (vol 1), he says that he was fifteen when he went blind. In The Price (Daredevil #223, vol1, see yesterday’s post), he mentions that he was “barely into my teens” at the time.

In the mini-series Daredevil: The Man Without Fear, by Frank Miller, Matt looks quite a bit younger than that in the hands of artist John Romita Jr. If you look at the bonus material near the back of the second Frank Miller omnibus (which collects The Man Without Fear), there’s a rough draft from 1988 of the story – which went by Blind Justice at the time – and it actually gives Matt’s age as sixteen. You wouldn’t think it from reading the finished graphic novel, however, and I suspect that might have influenced the general perception that Matt was just a child at the time of the accident.

In the 2003 movie, actor Scott Terra was fourteen when he played young Matt Murdock, though he looks like he could be a year or two younger than that. And, in a volume 2 issue by Brian Bendis and Alex Maleev, a flashback of Jack’s murder – more on that below – shows Matt looking like he may be as young as eight. With the new Netflix show, it’s clear that the timescale has indeed shifted compared to Stan Lee’s original story.

Matt’s age at the time of Jack Murdock’s murder

People who haven’t read Silver Age Daredevil – or the Brubaker/Lark run, for that matter – may be forgiven for assuming that Jack Murdock died when Matt was very young. That’s what happened in the 2003 movie, and it’s clearly what happened in the Bendis/Maleev story I mentioned. It also appears to be what happened in The Man Without Fear, again mostly due to the art which makes Matt look very young for his age. A careful reading will reveal that only a year has passed between Jack’s murder and Matt’s first day of college.

The original version of events actually have Jack dying shortly before Matt graduates from law school (or finishes his undergraduate studies, Stan Lee appears to have forgotten that you need to go to law school to be a lawyer). I have always preferred this take on the origin. First of all, it has Jack’s death and Matt becoming Daredevil – and staring his legal career! – happening in rapid succession, which makes sense considering they’re all connected. In The Man Without Fear, Matt avenges Jack’s death before becoming Daredevil, wearing the black costume that has clearly served as the inspiration for the costume in the Daredevil show, though the revenge comes shortly after his father’s death.

It appears from the photo of the crime scene, above on the far right, that the Netflix show will go the route of having a Matt who was blinded at a very young age also lose his father at a young age, along the lines of what we saw in the 2003 movie and what can be inferred from the Bendis/Maleev run. There are a couple of problems with this approach: 1) What finally prompts Matt to become Daredevil many years later, and 2) who took care of him all those years when he was still a child? With over twelve hours of footage, I wonder if and how the show’s creators will address this gap?

Matt and Stick

One thing that my guest Claire and I joked about in a recent podcast was whether the “young Matt hypothesis” would leave poor Matt to be raised by his mentor Stick. Because there can be no doubt about it, Stick would be a truly awful parent. In the comics, he doled out the kind of tough love that probably should have prompted a call to child protective services, had anyone actually known about it.

Joking aside, the inclusion of Stick is a very smart move. When he was introduced in the comics, during Frank Miller’s first run on the book, he made the concept of blind youngster with heightened senses turning to life as a vigilante seem much less implausible. Stick is himself blind, from birth, and it makes sense that Matt would benefit from learning from someone like himself.

Matt’s training with Stick gets a fair amount of coverage in the Daredevil: The Man Without Fear series, and it’s clear from the footage we’ve seen so far that it has provided inspiration for the Netflix show. See the pages below, from the first issue of The Man Without Fear:

Radioactive goo – or something else?

I wanted to end with just a few words about the technical aspects of Matt’s accident. One difference that jumped out at me between the scene in the TV spot clip above and the corresponding one from the Daredevil movie is the perspective. In the 2003 movie, we almost seem to be looking at it from the “point of view” of the blinding agent, working its way into Matt’s body, seemingly adding its magic as it goes. In the Netflix take on it, you actually see it from Matt’s perspective, as his visual field narrows and his sight is destroyed. It’s actually quite dramatic, and really emphasizes how deeply traumatic the event would have been for young Matt.

What’s odd, though, is that the grown Matt shows no visible signs of the ordeal. I know that Charlie Cox mentioned in his podcast interview with EJ Scott that they didn’t want to do anything dramatic with the eyes since that would be a bit cliché. While I’d normally agree, I’d argue that Matt’s case is different from that of most blind people whose eyes often do look completely normal. After all, he lost his sight in an accident severe enough to blind him nearly instantly.

So, will the blinding agent actually be radioactive? We can’t know at this point, but I suspect they might change that part of it up a bit, or simply leave out the details of the chemical and physical nature of the substance. Matt doesn’t seem to be getting very much of it on him in the footage we’ve seen, so it’s clearly something very potent. Ionizing radiation from a radioactive compound is far from the only factor that can cause mutations in living organisms (there is a long list of chemical agents that damage DNA), so it’s certainly possible to go the mutation route – if that’s what they choose to do – and still stay clear of the radioactivity and its 60s connotations.

Community Spotlight:♥ hp_darkages: The Harry Potter Dark and Angsty Age-Disparity Community, focused on Cross-Gen pairings/characters. It has a year-long Prompt Table Challenge, with a final deadline in November 31st.

I will be travelling to Salzgitter again tomorrow, this is the view in the early hours of the morning, the steelworks expanding across the horizon…. as I am wokring on a slightly larger version also (300cm x 170cm) I will be checking up on some more detail… and other things...

Why this piece is awesome: This cute and fluffy work feels like the perfect way to end my month of Classic Who recs. I love the way this artist can make a few lines express so much. In this work I'm particularly fond of the Brigadier's perplexed look.

= On Saturday, I made bacon for sandwiches like this video suggests (as found on tumblr), and it worked really well! Except for the part where the first time I picked up a woven square of bacon, I dropped it on the floor. *sadhair* One less bacon sandwich for me.

= I started the process of poking places for my refunds from the bag shopping/returning, and it's just irritating how they charge you ASAP when you buy something, but then you have to wait at least a billing cycle (or more!) to see the refunds. Bah.

ETA: To counteract my annoyance, the people at Haiku followed up with a phone call from their VP of Customer Service to apologize for the bag never being delivered, even though that's UPS's fault, and they gave me a coupon! So in addition to liking their bags, their customer service is pretty savvy. I recommend them if you're in the market! (http://www.haikubags.com) /eta

= I did manage yesterday to get all my dogdaysofsummer ficlets up on AO3. I'd forgotten there were so many! That was one of my favorite fannish experiences ever. I still can't believe it'll be ten years in August. *sigh*

= Also yesterday, when I bent (at the knee!) to pick up my groceries after unlocking the front door, something in my back went SPROING! and now I have a lot of pain located right above my right hip. Ugh. I've been taking advil like candy, which I know is bad, but nothing else (that I have access to without a prescription) seems to help! I will definitely be stopping off at Duane Reade after work for some Icy Hot patches.

American impressionist Walter Launt Palmer (1854–1932) was known for three themes: snowy forests, Venetian lagoons, and opulent interiors. To all three of those subjects he brought an evocative feeling for light and color.

An exhibition of Walter Launt Palmer at New York State's Albany Institute of History and Art features all three of those themes. The show just opened and it will be up through August 16.

The museum has one of the largest holdings of his work, and they'll be showing oil and watercolor paintings, pastels, and drawings, as well as letters and photographs.

When he was just 24 years old, Palmer studied landscape painting with Frederic Church. He shared a studio with Church in New York City from 1878-1881.

Walter Launt Palmer made many trips to Europe. He met John Singer Sargent, William Merritt Chase, John Henry Twachtman, Robert Frederick Blum, and probably a lot of other guys with three names.

After seeing the young Sargent's sketchbooks, Palmer wrote home, "He is but 17 and has done a lot of work, very little in oil."

Palmer was the one who recommended that Sargent should study with Carolus Duran [Edit: Palmer gave up his place in Carolus-Duran's atelier for the younger artist, whom he had met two years earlier in Florence.] Palmer was so impressed with the younger painter's bold and vigorous style that he tried a similar approach himself for a while.

Palmer's winter scenes were constructed with a combination of outdoor studies, photographs, and memory.

Many of us received Acceptance Letters from Spectrum this past week, while others had to come to terms with having their work rejected.

Obviously, being accepted into Spectrum is a happy occasion, and extremely well deserved. However, dealing with the rejection is a lot more difficult, especially if you've been trying year after year to get in. It's hard not to be discouraged when you feel like you did your best, and it still wasn't good enough. Trust me when I tell you, that feeling NEVER goes away. Rejection always stings.

I was extremely fortunate this year to be accepted into the annual again, and even more fortunate to be nominated for an award.

To the outsider, it may seem that the same professionals get in year after year with ease, while others continually struggle. But that's not entirely true. What you don't see amongst all those joyous acceptance posts on Facebook is the all of work that was rejected from those very same pros.

For every one piece I get in, usually four are rejected. And that's after I've already culled them down to only my best works.

So, I thought it would be enlightening to showcase just some of the work that I submitted to Spectrum this year that did NOT get in.

Rejected!

Rejected!

Rejected!

Rejected!

Rejected!

And this isn't even all of them!

Every one of these pieces, some of which were actually my personal favorites of the year, will NOT be included in this year's annual.

Does that mean they aren't any good? No. Does it mean I'm not any good? No. It just means that these particular pieces didn't entice these particular jurors as a group, enough to garner sufficient votes. In fact, some of these very same pieces may be accepted next year by a different jury.

These rejected pieces also serve to make me more appreciative of what I achieved with the pieces that did get in, noticing qualities in them that I hand't noticed before.

So, in celebration of all those who did NOT get into Spectrum, but keep trying year after year anyways, I salute you! Determination is one of the most important qualities an artist can have, and is an essential ingredient of success. I hope you all take this rejection in stride, and continue to strive for your goals!

In January 2015 I was hungry for fiction and had run through my friends' recommendations, so I started looking through Goodreads. I found a book called Flight of the Silvers, by Daniel Price. The reviews were largely positive and the summary seemed interesting. I downloaded a sample and decided it was engaging enough to buy.

Trouble began shortly thereafter. At the 20% mark, I knew this book and I would never be friends. The story wasn't right for me for many reasons, ranging from Science Doesn't WORK That Way to These Women Are Like No Human I've Ever Known to Please Stop Using That Word Please Stop PLEASE JUST STOP. The pacing fell off as the author tried to manage more characters and a more divided plot than he knew how to handle. There were long chunks of text that desperately needed editing. And I was frustrated by the fact that one of the characters, Hannah, was described pretty much only by her boobs. Her characterization could be summarized as "the attractive one with the giant hooters." Her plot role was "the mobile boobs that everyone either admires or is jealous of." The obsession with her breasts was like a dripping tap: ignorable right up until it becomes all you can think about it. I read distractedly, waiting grimly for the next mention of Hannah and Her Boobs. (As there were typically multiple mentions per page in any section she was in, it was never a long wait.)

From 25% on, my notes in the ebook consist of:

Increasingly sarcastic comments on some of the mentions of Hannah's boobs (they come too often to note all of them).

Complaints about overuse of the word "shined." (Three months after reading the book, I'm still flinching when I see it. It was really overused.)

Lengthy strings of question marks after some of the seriously, um, interesting word choices in the book. (After a while, I started to slip some exclamation points in these, too.)

Here's an example. At one point, one of the characters describes a pseudoscience substance as "both airy and dense." A male character (one of the good guys, of course; misogyny is a noted good guy trait) responds, "Huh. Just like Hannah." The next part, a direct quote: "More people laughed as the actress irreverently narrowed her eyes at Zack. He shined a preening smirk." Okay, so I think we can see that this is, just in general, really bad writing (he shined a preening smirk?), but what the hell is irreverently doing in that sentence? It makes no sense. My note on this one: "????? wtf wtf wtf EW also shined NO." As you can probably tell, the book was getting to me.

We all know how this goes. The bad writing distracted me from the, you know, actual story. (I probably missed a lot of it, which is what bad writing does: it gets between you and what the writer is trying to convey.) The pacing, already flawed, entirely stopped carrying me. I reached the point where I was looking for things to do instead of reading, which is weird for me. I'd read a page, spend five minutes on twitter, and come back and realize I had no memory of what I'd read, also very weird for me.

I should have walked away. I didn't.

When I was done (so very done) with the book, I went to Goodreads and reviewed it. I have to either adore or truly despise a book to churn out a 3000-word review of it. Flight of the Silvers didn't seem worth that, so instead of detailing all my problems with it, I wrote a description of what reading it felt like to me. The word "boobs" is featured very heavily. And that was it. Two people read my review, I think. No one really pays attention to that stuff.

All of this is textbook standard reader behavior. I bought a book, I read it, I didn't like it, I complained about it to my friends. And that should have been the end of it.

Except. Then Daniel Price read my review. And he got mad, which is totally understandable; someone slamming your work is always tough to swallow. (I'm going to guess that most authors know better than to read one-star reviews for this reason.) And then he decided to respond, which was probably not the best choice he could have made. His response makes me so embarrassed on his behalf that I've never read it all the way through; I get maybe a quarter of the way through skimming it and my brain just shuts down. But, basically, as far as I can tell, he was trying to be funny. He missed that mark for me, but maybe that was because I was, you know, writhing in secondhand embarrassment. Or maybe that's because I was his target rather than his audience. Hard to say.

And then a few of his fans got involved, which was inevitable -- they love his work, they saw him doing this, they assumed it was okay. (Guess how many comments it took before someone accused me of being his ex-girlfriend. GUESS.) He also started complaining about me on Twitter, which encouraged more of his followers to comment angrily on my review.

In response, I did a Dumb Thing (because not responding is the only way to deal with this stuff) and complained about this situation on Twitter myself, which meant that my friends started reading my review and Price's response. (This is how my review ended up the first one on the book's page on Goodreads. Authors, if you're looking for motivation not to get into it with a reviewer, there's a point to consider.) My friends also started searching through the other reviews. And noticing stuff. Several of them pointed out that while other reviewers complained about the boob fixation, Price only got publically mad at the lady who did. This may not be a coincidence.

The commenters on my review got personally insulting (remember, folks, it's not that you disagree with the reviewer, it's that the reviewer is a terrible person and a troll or simply a bitch) and kind of gross. I stopped visiting the page, which kept me from getting notifications about further comments. My friends kept on following them, though, so I got occasional updates on the situation. It apparently took Price a week or two to stop complaining about me on Twitter. (Or, I guess, for my friends to stop looking.) It took longer before his fans stopped insulting me on Goodreads. (If they ever have.)

And here's the thing: this is, by itself, a minor incident. But it isn't fun. It isn't how I want to interact with a community, or something I want to deal with. And I realized that using Goodreads meant accepting a chance of this kind of bullshit every time I posted a less than five-star review. There is a lot I like about Goodreads, but I am not that invested in reviewing in that space, not enough that it's actually worth being harassed by an author and his fans. So I finished my self-assigned challenge (rate the first 24 books I read this year) in February and started avoiding Goodreads again. I'll maybe try again next year. Who can say?

Is there a way to avoid this? I don't know. But Goodreads doesn't seem interested in trying. And, in the end, this part of the internet isn't important enough to me to wade through the sewage.